Wednesday, October 26
Stalker/Pripyat
The picture on the left is from Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. The picture on the right was taken in Pripyat, Ukraine, an abandoned town adjacent to Chernobyl. Tarkovsky's film came out in 1979; the Chernobyl disaster took place in 1986. Many see Tarkovsky's film as prophetic, a forecast into the future from one of Russia's great mystical filmmakers. Not only is the area where much of the action in Stalker takes place referred to as "the zone" (just like the zone surrounding Chernobyl), but both zones are littered with the decaying remnants of abandoned cities. It's an eerie similarity, and that similarities is one of the chief reasons for Tarkovsky's continued importance in Russian cinema.
One example of this importance is a soon-to-be released video game called S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. It combines elements of Tarkovsky's movie (and the science fiction book Roadside Picnic, from which it is based) and the events and realities of Chernobyl. It's a convergence of chaos, human tragedy, and art, all rolled into a first-person shooter game. The game's not even out and there are already fan sites sprouting up all over the web and all over the world (especially eastern Europe). People have been writing stories based on the characters and the scenarios.
There's something potent and powerful about the mythology of traumatic events, as if they open up a bubble in our imaginations that can be filled with all our hopes and fears. To create virtual universes where magical and endless adventures exist within a space usually reserved for terror and sadness is a liberating concept.
Hell, it's a better way to deal with death and destruction than to take it out on poor people in third world countries (which is what happend to people in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11). We need a "Ground Zero" video game, where the events of 9/11 created a race of superheroes or evil villains or something. That's the way to deal with grief--tell stories about it that are far more distracting than the grief itself.
